One rainy October evening, shortly before 8:00 p.m., I found myself outside of the Wah Mee Club, holding an unloaded .22 Ruger and staring at the entrance to the Club.

"That was the type of gun they used," my friend told me. Though I knew the three young men had used small, palm-sized .22 Rugers to kill their victims, I'd never actually had the opportunity to hold such a weapon. I was seated in the passenger seat of a suburban, red mini-van, listening to the rain tap against the metal roof of the van. All seemed still. Although the evening was windy enough to send traffic lights swinging like pendulums, we were parked in an alley, protected from the gales by tall, aged buildings.

The driver of the van was an older, well-dressed man named Windsor Olson. Olson was a retired private investigator, who had snooped around hotels, bottle clubs, and brothels since the late-1940s -- spying on crooks, keeping tabs on unfaithful husbands, and generally tailing what could only be described as a real gift-sampler of sociopaths. "I'll tell you," Olson commented, earlier that evening, "I'll bet I drilled a hole in the wall of every room at the Edgewater Hotel at one time or another, for cameras and listening devices." We were headed south along Interstate-5, toward the city. Thick, smoker's-lung clouds promising more rain shadowed the skyline. Olson, still dapper in his mid-seventies, wore a pressed shirt, dark blazer, and slacks. He had the clean presence of a distinguished gentleman whom had seen all of Seattle's historical tumors -- twice -- and walked away from them with a sense of mild interest. Corrupt cops and speakeasies and brothels didn't shock Olson; rather, they helped shape Seattle's history -- as had the 1962 World's Fair or early Pioneer Square.

Sitting in the van, outside the Wah Mee, holding the gun and looking at the entrance, now shrouded in shadows, Olson recapped the events of the night of the killings. I'd heard all the details before, but I was surprised by one new piece of information.

"You know," Olson reminisced, "I used to be a member of the Wah Mee."

"Really?"

"Back in the 1940s, my wife and I went to the Wah Mee." And Olson proceeded to tell me what the Wah Mee was like, just after World War II, when the Club was open to all races. It was a hot spot for dancing and drinks. Olson and his wife, Dorie, frequented the Club three nights a week to dance, drink, and socialize.

"I remember," Olson told me, "There was only one set of security doors back then. Once someone buzzed you in, there was a three-foot Buddha on a pedestal just inside the entrance. That Buddha's belly had been rubbed so many times for good luck."

There was, of course, gambling when Olson and his wife frequented the Club. "But that was upstairs," Olson said. "Not out in the open on the lower floor."

"And what about gambling tolerance and police corruption?" I asked.

"Oh, sure, there were bagmen at the Wah Mee," Olson replied. "When I went to the Club, the bagman was a cop named Tommy Smith. He was a drunk. One night, he comes into the Wah Mee, drunk as can be, and sits up at the bar. For some reason or another, he draws his weapon and he's so drunk and clumsy, it flies across the floor of the Club. The whole place is silent. That thing could have gone off and killed someone! He was crazy!"

We sat in the rained-on van outside the Wah Mee, staring at the Club's facade. I was amazed by our differing impressions of the Club. For myself and countless others, it is the locale of the worst mass murder in Seattle history. For Olson, though, it recalls dancing the night away with his wife. He was then a young, green private investigator at the time, just back from the War, and I imagine him swaggering into the joint with his woman on his arm, a gun tucked away in his holster, and feeling for all the world like he was a larger -- yet clandestine -- part of a city packed with corrupt cops, speakeasies, and whores.

Olson steered the van out of the alley and turned right onto South King Street. I directed him eastbound along South King Street, making a left on Eighth Avenue. I told Olson to stop outside the entrance to the Don Hee Apartments. "See that door," I said, pointing at a plate glass door and, beyond it, a narrow carpeted staircase. "That's the entrance to Wai Chin's apartment building."

"He was the old man who survived the shootings, right?" Olson asked.

"Yep." The apartment building was located adjacent to the Interstate-5 overpass, where the Interstate curves as it weaves through downtown. Only a few blocks from the Wah Mee, I could imagine Chin, older and slow-moving, gently closing the door behind him and shuffling down Eighth Avenue, toward the restaurants and gambling clubs that lined South King Street.

Olson pulled away from the apartment building, and I directed him westbound along South King Street. We rode for a few blocks before stopping outside the Tai Tung restaurant -- just around the corner from the Wah Mee. "That's where Tony Ng and Willie Mak were last spotted before the killings," I said. The restaurant's windows -- tinted brown….The interior -- illuminated by hot lamps in the kitchen and the restaurant's low lighting….A half-dozen older Chinese men sat at the counter, smoking cigarettes and eating a late dinner.

Shortly before leaving Chinatown, Olson drove to a narrow alley adjacent to the Seafirst Bank parking lot. "See that manhole cover?" he asked. I could see, flooded in the glare of the mini-van's headlights, a large, weathered, copper-colored manhole cover exhaling a thin, vertical line of steam. "One day, back in 1959, I got a call to investigate a murder. That was around the time of a very bloody tong war. If you ask the Wing Luke Museum about tong wars during the 1950s, they'll say there was no such thing. But it was a bloody thing here in Chinatown, the Chinese tongs fighting for control. We think of them now as crime families but that's not totally accurate. They were organizations that kept order and maintained the traditions of the Chinese community, which was largely ignored by the mainstream politicians and city administration. Right here, in this alleyway, right where that manhole cover is, was where, one morning during that war, they found the head of a man. Just the head."

"Did you solve the murder? Was the body ever found?"

"Nope."

Olson drove toward Pioneer Square. He wanted to show me more criminal-historical points of interest in Seattle. "I was here when this was a really rough town," he said. "A military town, a logging town, a town whose tone and tempo were set by sailors and longshoremen. When this was known as one of the most corrupt cities and counties in the nation. But it's always been a city with a soul and -- at least until recently, when it started to take itself a little too seriously sometimes -- a city with a sense of humor." We continued through Pioneer Square, past the circa-1900s stone-and-brick buildings that once housed the city's popular speakeasies and whorehouses. "All of that's still here in the shadows of the bright buildings, behind the new facades of the old buildings."

Olson drove along First Avenue, turning right on Cherry Street. We parked at the foot of Cherry Street -- a steep hill that climbed past the courthouse, police station, and jail, stretching past the Interstate toward the backside of Capitol Hill. Olson pointed at the entrance to a very swank, upscale Middle-Eastern restaurant. "That's where my wife and I got married," he said. "We danced and drank until dawn." Olson explained that the place was once a bottle club, back around the time of his marriage, and one of the more popular drinking joints in the city.

Olson turned the mini-van around and we continued toward Elliott Bay, a block away from First Avenue. He made a right turn down a shadowed alley marked with a few streetlamps that seemed to sizzle in a rain that fell heavily. He steered the van about a quarter of the way down the alley, stopping outside the entrance to a very tall, weathered building that loomed above us. I tried to see its facade entirely, but tall and narrow, seemingly disappearing into rain and low clouds, it seemed to stretch forever.

"This building was once a private bank of sorts," Olson explained. "The Pioneer Safety Vaults. Four-hundred of the sixteen-hundred safety deposit boxes were filled with cash, gold from Alaska, jewels, negotiable bonds, hush money, and various ill-gotten gains and money hidden away from the tax collector -- that sort of thing.

"Well, it was over the three-day holiday for George Washington's birthday in 1954. And it was the evening of the policemen's ball. Downtown was quiet with little traffic and very few cops. A crew of robbers blocked off both ends of the alley with barricades and went in and emptied the place out. It took them six or eight hours. Downtown was so quiet and the men were so confident, one of the robbers sang opera songs at the top of his lungs while cleaning the place out.

"Now, considering where a lot of that money came from, there wasn't a big official effort to dig deeply into the case. The official estimates put the take at between $100,000 and $400,000. Other estimates approach one-million dollars. From what I heard, it might have been as high as $2 million. Supposedly, some years later, after the statute of limitations had run out and he couldn't be prosecuted, some safecracker in Portland admitted to pulling the job. But that could have been just bragging. We'll never know."

Olson and I continued our drive through downtown, heading north along First Avenue. He pointed out an office building on the right. "That used to be a department store where I worked in my late-teens," Olson told me. "Each morning, there was an old Indian woman who sat outside the store's entrance selling baskets. It was my job to shoo her away. Guess who that woman was?"

"Who?"

"Chief Seattle's daughter."

We passed the Showbox Theater, across from the Pike Place Market. "That used to be the Music Box," Olson said. "I remember Sally Rand doing her bubble dance at the Music Box."

Olson began his career as a private investigator in 1958. He was one of only seven P-Is in Seattle. Now, there are nearly 500 in Washington State. "I'd gone straight from Broadway High School in 1944 to the war in the South Pacific," Olson explained. "When I came home, I tried working as a salesman for Greater Mountain Chemical Company, but I wasn't happy. A friend of mine was in insurance and he told me that there might be a lot of work for someone like me, who was good with a camera, doing insurance investigations. And no, I seldom carried a gun. I never have liked guns. I did have one, though. It was a Walther PPK, just like James Bond carried. The guy I bought it from swore it once belonged to Ian Fleming. I don't know about that. And anyway, it was stolen out of my car a lot of years ago."

In 1993 he sold the business to an associate, Scott Hatten, and retired. Along with P-I work, Olson started Bucky's courier service and the first armored-car company in Seattle. "I knew the streets," Olson said.

Olson and I cruised past Pike Place Market. He pointed out the La Salle Hotel -- above the market -- which was one of the biggest brothels during the early-1900s. We drove through Belltown, toward Queen Anne, and parked outside the Seattle Center, near the west entrance of the Key Arena. Olson pulled a weathered, wooden "billy club" from a leather bag between the front seats. He handed the wooden object to me and I examined the item, rolling it in my hands, making mini half-swings, and guessing its weight.

"I found that billy club over there," he said, pointing to a row of rhododendron bushes. "It was the same place where cops found a pool of blood."

Olson found the billy club back in 1969, and it was of particular importance to him because the weapon was used to murder one of his clients. In early-1969, a 58-year-old female restaurateur named Yi Yun Chen Lee approached Olson. Mrs. Lee suspected that her husband was cheating on her. Furthermore, she feared that her husband might steal and exploit her secret recipe for beef tenderloin dishes. "She kept that recipe on her person at all times -- didn't even share it with her husband," Olson explained.

Mrs. Lee was no paranoid nutcase. She was a bright, ambitious woman who owned the Mongolian Steak House at the Seattle Center. As a teenager in her native China, she had joined the revolution against the Manchu Dynasty. She also joined Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang and, during the Sino-Japanese War, served as the only female general on the front lines. After emigrating to the United States, she earned a masters degree in Municipal Administration from the University of Michigan and worked for a number of years in the Washington, D.C., area, where she met her husband, chemist Chin Joe Lee. During the World's Fair, the couple visited Seattle and realized there was an opportunity to make money in the restaurant industry. They stayed and opened the Mongolian Steak House.

"Now, something was bothering her," Olson told me. "She asked me to follow her husband, to find out how he was spending his time. So I followed him. But all I could come up with was how he spent every morning at the Logan Building on Sixth and Union -- at the stock market board."

On the morning of June 29, 1969, at about 2:00 a.m., Mrs. Lee left the Mongolian Steak House with about $1,000 in receipts. She lived within walking distance of the restaurant, on Queen Anne hill, but never made it home that morning. Later, a search turned up a pool of blood and a shoe near the rhododendron bushes -- but no body.

"The police talked to me for all of two minutes, about what I might know," Olson explained. "I went to the Center myself and poked around, and that's when I came up with the billy club, near what was apparently the murder scene." A few hours later, at 8:00 a.m., Mrs. Lee's body was found in the bushes off East Interlaken, her skull fractured in two places.

Though the murder was never solved, Olson had his suspicions. He believed it was Mr. Lee who murdered his wife. On the morning of Mrs. Lee's murder, Mr. Lee phoned the police at 3:00 a.m. to report his wife never made it home. Olson suspects that Mr. Lee murdered his wife near the bushes at 2:00 a.m., dumped the body, and returned home an hour later to call the cops and establish an alibi.

Though a reward of $10,000 was posted for information about the murder, no arrest was ever made. "The purse with the receipts," Olson said, "and, maybe more significantly, the recipe, were never found. I could never shake the feeling that the recipe for that sauce figured into it all somehow."

We left the Seattle Center and weaved along narrow roads that carved across Queen Anne hill. We cruised in the rain, past the Japanese Consulate's mansion, a beautiful, sprawling estate overlooking the city. We passed a tall apartment building garnished with wrought iron railings. Olson told me it was the locale of one of this city's most successful "cat burglars" -- a man who scaled the wrought iron facade during a particularly hot summer, when residents kept their windows and sliding doors open while they were away at work. We drove past the home of one of Seattle's most horrific murders. One night a prowler entered a stranger's home, looking for jewels and money. What he found, instead, was the home's owner -- a single woman who lived alone. He killed the woman with a hatchet, slicing off her head, and scrawling a cryptic message in blood on a bedroom wall. Sadly, Olson told me, the victim's daughter was so distraught over the incident that, a short time later, she committed suicide.

We parked outside an old apartment building where a prostitute was murdered. A resident of the building brought the woman home, murdered her, and then proceeded to dismember the body using a filleting knife. The killer filled plastic trash bags with body parts, loaded the sacks in his car, and proceeded to drive to a dumping site north of Seattle. "He was stopped," Olson told me, "by a cop who told him he was driving uncontrollably. He was weaving his car all over the road. The thing is, the man's arms and hands were covered in blood, yet the cop let him go." The body was found a short time later. The killer, a postal employee, was arrested at his work.

Finally, we drove to a sloping street near the top of Queen Anne. Olson parked the car outside a beautiful, yet modest, home with a slanted roof and antiquated shingles. "I used to live in that house," Olson told me. From late-1984 through May 1985, Olson shared the neighborhood with an unruly guest: a rooster.

The rooster, which neighbors aptly named "Wild Rooster Cogborne," spent nearly a full year sweeping a dozen or so domestic hens off their nests and into the trees. Furthermore, at 3:00 a.m. every morning, Cogborne would crow from his roost in one of the street's tallest trees. The neighbors grew restless. Police, firefighters -- even the Boy Scouts -- were called to try and quiet the neighborhood. "People tried tranquilizer darts," Olson said. "People tried nets. The favorite bait was chicken feed soaked in vodka because they figured the rooster would be easier to deal with if it was drunk. Others tried poison, but they caught a lot of criticism for trying to kill the bird."

One neighbor ran out of his home one night, shooting at Cogborne with a .22 Caliber rifle.

Cogborne was finally killed, but not before putting up a good fight. The incident had drawn so much attention, an obituary ran in the Seattle Times:

"In memory of the great Queen Anne rooster -- Wild Rooster Cogborne. After surviving slingshots, guns, poison darts, tranquilizers, leg-hold traps, Boy Scouts, freezing weather, snow, garbage trucks, nets, and taxis, he limped on mortally wounded, for three weeks before he died of lead poisoning."

Olson and I left Queen Anne. We drove north, to the University Plaza Hotel, where he dropped me off outside the lobby. We sat for several moments, the mini-van idling in the hotel's circular driveway. Our discussion returned to the Wah Mee. He asked me how my book was coming along. I grilled him a bit about his time spent, some fifty years ago, drinking and dancing at the Wah Mee.

"Have you been in the place since?" I asked.

"No," Olson replied. "I wanted to lease the place and turn it into a museum of sorts." Olson wanted to house his mementos and photos documenting this city's history of corruption, vice digressions, speakeasies, and whorehouses. He had tried contacting the building's owner on several occasions, but the owner always hung up on him. "I guess it's too soon to do anything with the space." I wasn't sure I agreed with Olson's plan of turning the Wah Mee into a museum. But, at the same time, I wanted to get inside the Club, to see what the interior was like. I wanted to pass through those security doors and roam around. It seemed admittedly perverse, but I wanted to walk in the footsteps of the Club's patrons. I wanted to stand where John Okada, Frank Chin, and Ruby Chow had stood. I wanted to imagine a room filled with well-dressed men and women, during the 1940s, drinking and dancing and generally having a good time. I wanted to hear the sounds of my footsteps echoing through the vacant space.

I promised Olson I would mail him some newspaper clippings and various photos I had acquired during my research. "If you do get a chance to go inside the place," I told Olson, "you have my phone number. Please give me a call."

"I sure will."

Chapter Thirteen | I know who you are. You know who I am. I'm not interested in how you got to Canada. I'm only interested in the investigation of the Wah Mee murders.

This story originally appeared as a serialized feature in Asian Focus newspaper